I try to not flood this feed with "DEALS EXTRA! LOWEST PRICE EVER (UNTIL NEXT WEEK)!" sorts of posts, but this case is an important exception. This week sees the release of Criterion's other big end-of-year boxed set release: the six-film Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project.
Amazon is selling it for $65 at the moment, and there's no way of knowing when the price will suddenly skyrocket. I hope that a sales success with this installment means that we see subsequent editions down the line.
For just over $10 per movie, you get new digital restorations, introductions to all the films by Scorsese himself, interviews with filmmakers, a visual essay, and more, including booklet essays by some of the sharpest critics in the world, including my friendly electronic acquaintance Bilge Ebiri among other experts in the cinema of different regions.
A rundown of the included films, from Criterion's site:
Touki bouki (Senegal, 1973)
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s.
Redes (Mexico, 1936)
In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen), one worker’s terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers.
A River Called Titas (India & Bangladesh, 1973)
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal.
Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964)
Metin Erksan’s wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops.
Trances (Morocco, 1981)
The beloved Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating musical documentary.
The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960)
A torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal is unleashed under one roof in this venomous melodrama from South Korean master Kim Ki-young.